Summary
During the Great Depression, John Steuart Curry devoted himself to painting sincere portrayals of the American heartland. At a time when critics were calling for an American vernacular art and the discovery of a usable past, Curry and other Regionalist artists headed the call to paint rural and small town America. These often idealized, even nostalgic, depictions of community, religious life, and indomitable work ethic aimed to provide solace to a populace suffering the effects of a financial disaster and widespread drought.
Recognized during his own time, along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Curry painted easel paintings as well as murals that decorated various government buildings. Unfortunately his more traditional style of painting did not sustain his reputation after his death, and Curry remains an often overlooked American painter.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Baptism in Kansas (1928)
The subject of the painting - religion, rebirth, and community ethics - was common to Regionalism, as it rejected urban cosmopolitanism in favor of heartland realism. The triangular composition of the priest propping up the woman's body mirrors the timber structures of the sturdy farm-buildings, celebrating the strength of core American values and institutions. The motor-cars, a symbol of 1920s capitalism and urban youth, are relegated to the outer fringes of the frame in favor of a vocal community chorus.
Present also are the beginnings of Curry's unique compositional style and his feel for expressive potential. The combination of the dominant spiral formation and multiple triangular shapes - the priest's legs, the perspective lines of the road and fields, the roofs, the sunbeams - create a tension between a sense of activity and motion and stability. As art historian Henry Adams explained, Curry's composition "simultaneously expresses claustrophobia and agoraphobia."
Tornado Over Kansas (1929)
This work earned Curry second-prize in the Carnegie Institute's Thirty-first Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, confirming his position as the foremost emerging painter of his day. It's a canvas of extraordinary power, both for its narrative thrust and its emotionally rich composition. Its turmoil and turbulence could also have a biographical reference, as Curry's own marriage at the time was uneasy. Curry's style here, too, is wrought from instability. Though it's figurative and peopled, art historian Henry Adams sees this painting as being right on the edge of abstraction, writing "With its distended figures and exploding buildings, the work appears to threaten to transform itself into a synthetic cubist composition. Traditional composition has here been pushed to an expressive limit, has come to the verge of becoming something completely different."
Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake (c. 1930)
The tree's canopy bears ripe, red fruit, one of which has fallen plump to the ground, suggesting fertility and life even amongst the throes of death. Curry's flair for capturing facial expressions is here transferred from people to hogs. Their snarls and focussed eyes exude personality and power, and the snake, too, has a voice. Violent and verdant, composed around the dark hole in the tree's trunk at the painting's center, the painting communicates a vital sense of the world's natural forces, its pounding rhythm and thrilling energy celebrates the pulse and cycle of life and death.
Ajax (1936-7)
Curry of course here occupies Grant Wood's Regionalist ideal - "a feeling for one's own milieu and for the validity of one's own life and its surroundings" - but reaches beyond to deconstruct epic myth through the starkness of the present moment. His face, four legs, and tail are rooted firmly in the American turf, but the sheer statement of his presence is timeless and placeless. Marianne Moore was a poet at the forefront of the high modernist movement, so her reference to Curry, the traditional Regionalist, is perhaps surprising, but points to Curry's strange and singular power, his unique positioning in the modern age as a small-C conservative with a modernist's sense of complexity, form, and contemporaneity. The language of Ajax is firm and absolute, but its possibilities and meanings refract through the ages.
Justice Defeating Mob Violence (1935-37)
The figures in the mob are crouched and aggressive, their poses mirrored by the submissive posture of the accused man, who crawls, bloodied, onto the steps of a courthouse. He has been reduced to an animal, or perhaps it is the mob who are dehumanized by their own actions, reeling into an indistinguishable mass in the center-background, engulfed in flame that is more hellish than it is purgative. The judge bears a serene expression on his face, every bit as monumental in his pose as the Neo-classical pillars of the courthouse behind him. His palliative, controlling arm is mirrored by the bough of peace in the top-center of the frame. The mask of the central figure along with the shadowed faces of the other figures suggests the impersonality and senselessness of mob-rule.
Art historian and Curry champion Lawrence Schmekebier described this painting as "not a symbol...but a universal situation, valid in the past as it will be in the future." Schmekebier identified Curry's penchant for slipping beyond immediate circumstance into something like Messianic Time, where past, present and future seem to occur simultaneously. The mob is a mob for the ages, the judge a figure of Absolute Justice.
Tragic Prelude (c.1938-40)
Curry's depiction of Brown is visceral, but also nuanced. Many saw Brown as a hero, others branded him a murderer and a terrorist. After Brown was sentenced to death for murder, the Transcendentalist writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said he would "make the gallows glorious like the Cross," and so Curry paints Brown in a stark and monumental cruciform, bellowing to the sky. Brown the soldier-prophet brandishes a bible and a rifle. There is blood on both of his hands. Curry paints an Old Testament fury into his figure, giving the painting a visionary power alongside its brutal violence. This painting is enduringly relevant as an exploration of the tensions at the core of American national identity.
Curry himself felt torn between his beloved but backward home of Kansas and the more cosmopolitan life he led while studying in New York and Paris, and this ambivalence perhaps found its way into his work with exaggerated and threatening figures. Citizens and officials in Topeka, the Kansas Capital, were critical of Tragic Prelude, worrying that tornadoes and prairie fires showed the state as stereotypically wild and dangerous, that the blood on Brown's hands portrayed him as the murderous lunatic that some historians believed him to be. The menacing and ominous overtones, which were not uncommon in Curry's work, often met with confusion and even dismissal, thus complicating his legacy. In this instance, Curry stormed out of Topeka and left the mural unfinished and unsigned. Despite this rejection, the painting survives as an important moment in the country's history, a complex commentary upon America's past and potentially its future.